Andrey Vyshinsky

Andrey Yanuaryevich Vyshinsky (10 December 1883-22 November 1954) was Prosecutor of the Soviet Union from 3 March 1935 to 31 May 1939 (succeeding Ivan Akulov and preceding Mikhail Pankratov) and Foreign Minister of the USSR from 4 March 1949 to 5 March 1953 (interrupting Vyacheslav Molotov's terms).

Biography
Andrey Vyshinsky was born in Odessa, Kherson Governorate, Russian Empire in 1883 to a family of Polish descent. Vyshinsky joined the Mensheviks in 1903 and became a student of law at Kiev University; he later joined the Red Army in the Russian Civil War and the Bolsheviks in 1920. He became professor of law at Moscow University, whose Rector he became in 1925. In subsequent years he became a noted prosecutor in political trials agianst Joseph Stalin's opponents. From 1935 to 1939, he was state prosecutor of the USSR, in which capacity he was the chief agent of Stalin's Great Purge. He held that a prisoner's guilt was absolute once a confession had been made, regardless of the conditions in which it was obtained. He was Vyacheslav Molotov's Deputy People's Commissar (later Minister) of Foreign Affairs from 1940 to 1949, and advanced to become Foreign Minister in Stalin's last years, but was demoted under Nikita Khrushchev to become the Soviet representative at the UN from 1953 until his death in 1954.